THE SAFE DRINKING WATER ACT

The Safe Drinking Water Act has been established in the United States to require
testing and control the chemical content only in water systems that supply more
than fifteen households, fifteen or more households.
Wells that service greater than fifteen households are regulated under the Safe
Drinking Water Act, which means that if a chemical is listed on the EPA's list,
then community supplies have to test for the presence of that chemical. And if a
maximum contaminant level has been set, that means that the provider has to
demonstrate that that ceiling has not been breached, or he or she would have to
install some sort of filtration system.
Surface water in the United States is generally undrinkable for a variety of
reasons, mostly because of biological contamination, the threat of E. coli, but also
giardia, which is carried by both humans and by animals in their wastes.
Monitoring and surveillance needs much improvement.
The Safe Drinking Water Act covers supplies that have more than fourteen
connections or more than twenty-four individuals. There are 53,000 water
systems in the United States, and 43,000 of those rely on groundwater and about
10,000 rely on surface water. And they're roughly split fifty-fifty, public and
private. And there are 15 million wells in the United States that serve individual
residences, and roughly 45 million people, maybe fifteen percent of the
population in the nation are drinking water that is completely unregulated by the
Safe Drinking Water Act.

There are about ninety-three chemicals that are not now on the Safe
Drinking Water list, that have maximum contaminant levels assigned to
them. EPA established both the maximum contaminant level, which is a
legally enforceable limit. But they also established a maximum
contaminant level goal, which is a health-based ceiling.
The Safe Drinking Water Act creates the contaminate level limit as the
highest concentration of a contaminant that's allowed. And it also allows a
cost-benefit analysis that's required under the Safe Drinking Water Act to
consider what the cost would be of meeting that limit. If the cost is found to
be excessively high, a goal would be set that would be higher to protect
human health, and allow a contamination level to be higher than that.